


Five office toys the team loves. (And one nobody will own up to.)

by Hagar



Series: Take Seven [6]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: 5 Things, Crack, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Humor, One Shot, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-11
Updated: 2010-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-10 01:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagar/pseuds/Hagar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penelope Garcia is rightly proud of her role in making the BAU office toys more like real playthings and less like executive showoff pieces.</p><p>It still doesn't make the marshmallow missile launcher her fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five office toys the team loves. (And one nobody will own up to.)

**Author's Note:**

> Do not drink anything while reading this fic, for the sake of your keyboard. Seriously.

Where there are office workers there are office toys. Boring things, usually, like wooden puzzles and magnetic perpetuum mobilae: executive showoff pieces, not genuine playthings. The BAU isn't like that, not anymore, and Penelope Garcia has had a hand in it. Her office is an inspiration, if she says so herself, and it makes everyone else feel more secure because wackiness is a relative thing and next to hers, everyone else's office delights are tame. And well, maybe her thinking that self-stirring mugs are appropriate birthday gifts had helped, too.

It still doesn't make the marshmallow missile launcher her fault.

**Stress balls are &lt;3**  
The stress balls were the first thing. Hers weren't the solid-blue boring ones, but yellow and purple and turquoise, and they had funny faces and funny shapes. That preoccupied profilers tended to leave Penelope's den still clutching said balls was proof of effectiveness, but at some point she'd had enough of slapping wrists so she bought a dozen of the things and left them all over the bullpen. She expected people to be happy. She didn't expect them to all but fight over who got the pink smiley, the yellow buttercup or Darth Vader, but that's exactly what had happened.

**Tupperware doesn't have to be boring**  
When Morgan stepped into her office asking if the biohazard tupperware was hers, she said it certainly was not. Then Reid walked in, flustered, and she was still trying to slow him down to an intelligible speech velocity when Gideon came in, slightly too upset about someone's idea of funny and assuming it was hers, which was what Reid had been trying to apologize for. It was Elle's, as it turned out: a protest on the state of the fridge. Hotch didn't think it was funny either, but within two weeks the fridge also grew chemical and nuclear waste lunchboxes.

**Shiny! **  
Morgan brought the ball on the jet as a joke: he'd gotten the first one for Clooney. He'd put it on the table on the way and everyone eyed it, wary, but didn't touch it. On the way back JJ held out her hand when he took it out again, he tossed it to her, and then everyone turned at her laughter: impact made the LEDs in the ball turn on and, so long as it stayed in motion, cycle colours. It was a full ten minutes before they put it down, and the ball hasn't left the jet since.

**What are you looking at? **  
Prentiss brought the first two, a gift for Reid because he was always toying with something and they looked like molecules. From there the tiny multiple-axes tops multiplied like tribbles. Colourful, translucent and a mix of round and square, people grabbed them all the time, spinning them or stacking them or just rolling them in their hands, and there never seemed to be enough icosahedrons to go around. The first four times tops got into the round table room, whoever brought them got a Look. The fifth, everyone very pointedly did not look at the cherry-red tetrahedron in Hotch's hands.

**u iz ohsum**  
They were pretty sure Rossi was responsible for the LOLcat magnets, because of the sheer balls it took to coat the BAU fridge with them and also because Garcia had explained LOLspeak to him the week before. Some got the hang of it faster than others but, within two weeks, they needed a second set as it became everyone's new favorite method for leaving public messages. Whoever got snarky needed to bribe Reid into silence with chocolate or be outted, but it was entirely possible that that was why Reid had taken to showing off his psycholinguistic prowess that way.

**…and one nobody will own up to. **  
Nobody expects FBI agents to come running out of bathrooms; then again, the agents who came running out of said bathrooms didn't expect the rubber duckies, either. Both the men's and the women's had been breached, prompting a "two UnSubs" theory and, by the time the security feed was declared unhelpful, Hotch was neck-deep into refereeing between the "duckies brightened up the place" and the "too much cognitive dissonance" camps and vowing to fire whoever responsible should they be caught. Eventually, he only banned the duckies because Strauss might use that bathroom one day, and that'll be interesting to explain.


End file.
